Followup

I got around to reading the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," on which the recent movie is based. As I guessed, it involves few of the specific events used so effectively in the Fincher film, though it does mirror them at least in passing (the Spanish Americaan War, for example, instead of World War II). The short story is much more satirical in nature, and Fitzgerald actually referred to it as an intentionally comic piece. While the film's more powerful drama is leavened with a fair amount of humor, it obviously has more important ideas to convey (though again, those ideas are not exactly alien to the original story-- there just not so overt). Fitzgerald said that he was prompted to write "Benjamin Button" by Mark Twain's famous comment that human aging ought to be reversed, and there is much that is "Twainian" about the short story, not the least its slightly biting sense of humor. Anyway, I'd recommend that you see the film and read the story for two different, though clearly related, approaches to the tale.